This guest post by Rachel Hock appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.
Conventionally, horror films punish women for their sexuality. This is particularly evident in the slasher films of the 70s and 80s such as Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But the grandaddy of them all is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho. The classic suffered three sequels in the 80s and early 90s and an ill-received shot-for-shot-remake by Gus Van Sant in 1998. Most recently, proto-slasher Norman Bates has been reincarnated in the pre-Psycho A&E TV series Bates Motel.
Bates Motel is both prequel and reboot. Set in the present day, it depicts Norman’s violent psychosexual development. Norman’s formative years are alluded to in Hitchcock’s film – an uncomfortable codependency with his mother – but the show’s creators have free reign to imagine what happened to Norman Bates to make him Norman Bates.
To put it lightly, there is plenty of fodder for a discussion of what is wrong with Bates Motel when viewed through a feminist lens. The series is garish in its use of sexual violence. There are instances of rape, sex slavery, and, as in its source material, women being punished for having sex. Even when there are consensual sex scenes, the narrative purpose is usually to forward the story or character arc of a male character. (Bitch Flicks writer Amanda Rodriguez explores the rape scene in the first episode of the series and its implications in her post “Rape Culture, Trigger, Warnings, and Bates Motel.”)
However, there exists an antidote of sorts in the character of Emma Decody (Olivia Cooke) – a 17-year-old with cystic fibrosis. In a show where sex is conflated with violence, male desire, and death, Emma is an oasis of sex positivity, female desire, and life.
After being friend-zoned (if you’ll excuse the expression) by Norman (Freddie Highmore) in favor of troubled popular girl Bradley (Nicola Peltz) in the first season, the second season presents a new love interest for Emma – small-time pot dealer Gunner (Keenan Tracey). When the beach-side memorial that Emma plans for ill-fated Bradley turns into a kegger, Emma gets drunk and asks Gunner to “make bad choices” with her.
What does it mean for Emma to want to “make bad choices”? By “bad choices,” she means doing those things that adults pretend teenagers don’t do: sex, drinking, and drugs. She is a level-headed character with good judgment and prone to doing the right thing; she is a Good Girl. For Emma to want to get a little bit wild, the valuable emphasis is on “choices.” The “bad” is coy and ironic. She doesn’t want to do bad things, she wants to make bad choices, or rather, she wants to make choices. She wants agency.
Drunk on the beach in this episode, Emma tells Gunner, “We’re not dead, OK. So we should live. But we’re going to die, y’know?” For her, with a stated life expectancy of 27, agency – and sexual agency in particular – is very much tied to the act of living.
The next episode finds Emma waking up in Gunner’s bed the next morning, unsure what had transpired the night before. When she finally confronts him to ask if they had sex, she is relieved to find out that they did not. (Gunner’s response – “Not that I didn’t want to sleep with you, just I prefer when the girls are conscious. Besides, if we did sleep together, you’d remember.” – makes me wince. He’s a real charmer, this one. But at Emma’s age I would have eaten it up.) Emma does in fact want to have sex with Gunner, which he senses, so later he finds her to ask her why her reaction was one of relief. “I was relieved because it would have been my first time,” she reveals.
Despite his preference for girls who are conscious, it escapes him that having sex with a blotto Emma would have been rape. Although she does not recognize this directly, she does indicate that the significance of her first time having sex is not derived from antiquated and romanticized notions of virginity and purity. Her first time is important to her because having sex is proof of being alive: “Just think how much pressure people put on their first time knowing that they’re going to have like a million more. Mine could be my only time, so I just, I want to make it count. Or at least be something I can actually remember.” Her life has been given an expiration date, and she’s more than halfway there. Having sex, and having the opportunity to consent to it, is literally a vital experience.
But sex isn’t merely symbolic for Emma. She wants to have sex. As Gabrielle Moss points out in a piece for Bitch Magazine about Bob’s Burgers‘ Tina Belcher, “the teenage girls of TV are typically portrayed as only capable of responding to sexual overtures – with varying degrees of disinterest, disgust, or enthusiasm, sure, but their sexuality almost exclusively exists in response to the overtures of male characters.” Emma doesn’t entirely break this mold. She waits for Gunner to make the moves. But just because she doesn’t take action first doesn’t mean that she isn’t an active participant. In anticipation of a date with Gunner, Emma asks Norman’s mother Norma (Vera Farmiga) what it’s like having sex for the first time. Emma confides, “There’s someone that I met and every time I’m with him that’s pretty much all I think about.” By thinking about and preparing for sex, she is represented as being in control of her sexuality.
And so Emma and Gunner have sex. They laugh and joke together as they undress and it seems every bit as lovely as Emma had hoped it would be. She is not punished for it. In fact, nothing comes of her tryst with Gunner. (In the next episode she does have a scary experience jumping off of a rope swing into a river, but there is nothing to suggest that this would not have happened if she had not had sex.) The other characters are unaffected. The plotline stands independently; Emma’s sexuality remains her own.
Does Bates Motel deserve a pat on the back and a job-well-done for including one positive representation of female sexuality? Not really. But a character like Emma in a show like Bates Motel is worth paying attention to.
Rachel Hock is a theater producer and arts administrator in Boston. She received a BA in English from the University of Rochester in 2009, and dreams of someday going to grad school to continue studying film theory and racking up student debt. She tweets mostly about food and TV at @RachelCraves